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Look it up, don't screw it up

For much of the last century, reporters on breaking news scenes relied on pay phones to call in their accounts of riots, elections, trials and fires.

Dean Tudor is a professor emeritus of Ryerson School of Journalism and the author of Finding Answers.
(SUPPLIED PHOTO)

By Dean Tudor

Sat., April 5, 2008

For much of the last century, reporters on breaking news scenes relied on pay phones to call in their accounts of riots, elections, trials and fires.

Rewrite desks in the newsroom fleshed out those details with material from the "morgue" (library files) and more interviews. Mistakes were inevitable and articles were updated between editions.

Today's reporters have video cellphones, wireless Internet laptops, and satellite transmitters – high-tech tools that can extend reporters' reach and sharpen their journalism. The global village of databases, newsgroups, blogs and websites, with almost unfettered access to articles, sources and background, can make their stories more complete and credible.

Nonetheless, inaccuracies continue to be published in newspapers. Why is this so? Do the media do enough in the pursuit of accuracy?

While I congratulate the Star for launching an Accuracy Tracker to track and monitor errors published in the newspaper in order to determine why errors happen, the highest standard for journalistic excellence should be "Accuracy always."

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How can today's high-tech journalists achieve this standard? The old-fashioned way, of course – by double-checking, never assuming, and not trusting memory.

I developed an Information Resources for Journalists course at Ryerson University in 1982 to promote the use of contacts, libraries, reference works and computer databases as a means of journalistic verification. The arrival of the Internet in 1992 changed search strategies and my course then also covered the online sector.

The goal of the mandatory course was to teach aspiring journalists the importance of accuracy and provide them with the tools to produce accurate journalism.

Every year, I taught students my personal code: "Look it up, and you'll remember it longer. Screw it up, and you'll remember it forever."

But, whether searching in reference works or online, students inevitably had to learn to overcome bad working habits. To convince them of the value of accuracy, I gave weekly news tests, requiring them to spell proper names correctly to get full marks – not just important foreign names, but also names then regularly in the news: "Mulroney," "Chrétien" and "Blair." I wonder how many times sports writer wannabes confused Pinball "Clemons" with Roger "Clemens."

I devised information scavenger hunts requiring students to verify everything using a second source. They had to find the most efficient resources to use for each question: experts, governments, associations and institutions, libraries, Internet or computer databases.

We worked on both subjective errors (omission, improper focus, under or overemphasis, illogical conclusions, headline distortion) and objective errors (misspelled names, wrong numbers, ages, times, dates and locations). I tried to impress upon them the reality that working with live sources can lead to errors through contradiction and misinformation, compounded by human factors of assumption, carelessness, misunderstanding and deadlines.

My goal was to teach budding journalists how to be accurate always. My top five tips remain relevant for this century's working journalists. And, given the immense scope for today's journalists to get things wrong by not properly verifying information from online sources, these tips may well matter more than ever. They are:

Corrections can be embarrassing to all: the newspaper, the writer, the editor. That's why we double-check. The best journalists have always known this – hence, the long-ago editor who wore both belt and braces so that he wouldn't be caught with his pants down.

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